Let Olympics win over Covid-19

Shadow over Tokyo Olympics: Now, less than 50 days before the grand opening of the Games of the XXXII Olympiad, already delayed by one year, a big question mark looms over it. — Reuters

HISTORICALLY, the Japanese love the Olympics, but they haven’t had the best luck with them. In the 1930s, Japan successfully made a bid to host the Summer Olympics in 1940, four years after Nazi Germany’s Berlin Olympics, but they had to give up the great enterprise because of World War II. In 1964, two decades after the war ended, they finally realised the ambition.

Since then, Japan twice played host to Winter Olympics in Sapporo and Nagano. And no one had thought of a pandemic when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting in Buenos Aires in 2013 gave Tokyo the right to host the Summer Games for the second time. It was an act of compassion and encouragement for a nation suffering the severe consequences of a tsunami and nuclear disaster two years earlier.